Content Management For Your Small Business

(Originally published March 10, 2020; Updated October 2022)

 

Content management is usually seen as a digital concept, but it’s been around for as long as content. For as long as humans have been creating content, we’ve been creating solutions to manage it. The need exploded, however, when the World Wide Web made the ability to publish content accessible to virtually everyone.

 

What is content management?

The modern definition of content management is the administration of digital content throughout its lifecycle, from creation to permanent storage or deletion. It includes all the strategies and actions involved across this lifecycle, including budgeting for content creation, determining ROI for content marketing campaigns, developing content marketing strategies, and more.

 

Essentially, there are four stages that content goes through: creation, distribution, maintenance, and archive or deletion. The creation stage includes budgeting, finding your company’s voice, and choosing content topics. Thoughtful content distribution is the key to increasing brand recognition, collecting followers and turning readers into customers. The maintenance stage is where you keep your content organized, and also calculate your ROI on it to determine if it is getting the results you want. Finally, it is important to know when to retire or archive outdated content.

 

Content Creation

 

Blogging is the most ubiquitous type of content because it can increase your visibility and strengthen your customer base when done correctly. Judicious use of keywords can make your website a resource for potential customers, increasing traffic to your website and keeping your audience informed. 

 

Blogging is a marketing channel that supports the growth of your business, much like social media, direct marketing, and email. The goal of blogging is to post information that is easy to read and useful enough to potential customers to keep them coming back. It is a great way to showcase what makes you different from your competitors and how much you value your customers. Blogging gives you an opportunity to discuss and instruct on matters relevant to your industry while also increasing your visibility and customer loyalty.

 

Content Distribution

 

Content distribution is the process of publishing, sharing, and promoting your blog content. Simply publishing an optimized blog to your website is a form of content distribution that will help search engine rankings. To really increase your visibility though, you need to share your published blog via other marketing channels such as social media and direct email. Sharing each blog post on multiple social media channels is free, fast, and gets your content in front of many more eyes. Email newsletters can give your subscribing customers a preview of your content and keep them coming back.

 

Content Maintenance

 

Content maintenance consists of everything we do to keep content current, relevant, and ranking well. Often this means updating old content so that it remains fresh rather than creating something from scratch.

 

Generally, we use a content management system (CMS) like WordPress to keep content organized and accessible. The CMS automatically organizes your posts and pages, making it simple to go back and edit content as well as add new pages or features. 

 

This is the stage where you should be calculating whether your content marketing is working or not. Calculating ROI is tricky even for the best of us. The key is to make a consistent plan for which KPIs and metrics you’re going to track so that you can reliably calculate the success of your efforts.

 

There are four key content metrics that you should be tracking:

• Consumption metrics such as page views, Facebook post reach, downloads, email opens, etc.
• Sharing metrics including likes, retweets, shares, and links to your content on social media.
• Lead generation metrics that track when your content directly results in an email opt-in, quote request, form completion, etc.
• Sales metrics that are quantifiable, showing what content directly resulted in a sale.

 

Archive Or Delete

 

For the most part, it is better to update and revive old content than to remove it. There are a couple of valid reasons to delete or retire content, however. One is if you receive a thin content manual action from Google. “Thin content” could be AI-generated content or scraped pages, but it could also just be low quality. The best way to get this penalty removed is to delete the page(s). 

 

The other reason to remove content is that it is simply no longer accurate or relevant. This is a constant issue for e-commerce sites that retire products or have limited-time listings or offers but only needs to be done sporadically for most service-based businesses, which makes it easy to forget. 

 

If the content is out of date but still getting traffic, the best practice is to edit the page and direct users to content that is more relevant. Make it clear that the information is outdated but that the correct information can be found through a direct link. This way you preserve the ranking you already have.

 

Content That Gets You Noticed

 

Every SEO-optimized blog you post adds an indexed page with relevant keywords to your website, which will drive traffic from search engines. By using targeted keywords in useful, informative posts, you increase your search engine ranking and bring in potential customers looking for a product or service you provide to your website. It is important to research the keywords and keyword strings your most likely customers search for and to include one 5-7 times per optimized post. Too much repetition will hurt your ranking, as will too little

 

Effective business blogging takes commitment and skill. Blogs that are infrequently updated, contain little relevant information, or have poor keyword usage will harm search engine rankings more than they help them. Learning and practicing effective techniques can be time consuming and difficult when you’re trying to run a small business. REAL Moxie understands this, and our dedicated expert bloggers are here to help. We do the research, the writing, and the distribution to help maximize your potential so you can focus on the work that makes your company great.

 

When Google profiles your site, it is evaluating everything from your content to your call-to-actions to your ads to find out more about your site’s identity. The social media architects at REAL Moxie, LLC know how to use content marketing and SEO to get your site and small business noticed. 

 

In addition to blogging, we can run your social media, creating daily posts and driving interactions on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Business Profiles. We manage your online presence so you have time to manage your business.

 

When you work with REAL Moxie, you can be confident that our experts in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content management will keep your website relevant, drawing in consumers and keeping current customers informed.

 

We get to know you and your business offerings and then work with you to develop content marketing strategies to fit your business model and budget. This includes website evaluations, message and content development, competitor analysis, and much more.

 

For information about content marketing solutions from REAL Moxie, LLC, click here.